It's that magical time of year again, when everyone expects a new iPad to be right around the corner. Which in turn means an amassment of iPad 3 rumors clogging up our lives. Here's a quick guide to making sense of them.

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Take all of these with the usual large piles of salt grains. Oh, and remember: The iPad may only be two years old, but it's already such an institution that any radical shifts in design or philosophy are almost definitely out of the question (sorry, 7-inch believers). But that doesn't mean we don't expect see some significant changes both inside and out.

Guts

It's extremely unlikely that anything other than a superfast new A6 chip will power the iPad 3, as Bloomberg and others have reported. The main question at this point seems to be whether that A6 will pack quad core power. On one hand, competitors like the Transformer Prime have moved on to quad core chips, and the incredible gaming and HD movie processing heft that upgrade entails. And both BGR and Bloomberg have recently reported that the A6 will indeed be quad core. But for what it's worth, Apple has shown in the past that it's willing to stand pat if it feels a spec is more than good enough for the next generation, like it did with the iPad 2's 512MB of RAM.

Bloomberg reports via Twitter that production of the next generation tablet is supposed to have…
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Speaking of RAM, if we're going to take the retina display rumors seriously, it would make sense that the RAM would finally see an upgrade in the iPad 3. The iPad 2's 512MB, like the iPhone 4S's, was buffered by the symbiotic relationship between software and hardware. But it stands to reason that the brute force required to push the massive number of pixels a 10-inch retina display would require a memory upgrade. File that under pure speculation.

We'll probably never hear an official justification for why Apple only put 512MB of RAM in the …
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Update: While we'd originally thought we would see a new A6 chip, we're leaning toward an A5X update. What does that mean to you? Not too much, aside from a break in Apple's chip-naming structure. We were never certain that we'd see quad core in this generation, and that's looking less and less likely at this point. Expect to see a linear-but-noticeable bump in performance and efficiency.

Jailbreak developer Chronic has some big news about the next iPad, Cult of Mac reports: it'll…
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Camera

iLounge cited several sources saying the iPad 3 will have an HD front-facing camera for HD Facetime. This would make a lot of sense, considering that quality front-facing cameras have found their way into phones like the Lumia 900, and people use their tablets for video chat much more than their phones.

It's worth mentioning here that while many of these hardware upgrade rumors seem inevitable, we thought the same about the whoops-that's-not-happening-iPhone 5. So keep that enthusiasm curbed until the official announcement.

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Network

BGR recently leaked debug screenshots of what it claimed was proof of both that fancy new A6 processor and global 4G LTE, and Japanese blog Macotakara reported similar network details around the same time. Bringing LTE to the iPad before the iPhone would make sense, because the iPad's larger battery can handle the 4G drain. Then again, a 4G iPad would almost certainly portend a 4G iPhone this summer, and it's not at all clear that Apple considers the network mature enough to hop on just yet.

iMore, citing the same source who was spot-on about a March 7th announcement date, says the iPad 3…
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Siri

iOS 6 is still a long way off, but the iPad 3's software warrants a quick mention because it might be the first non-iPhone 4S Apple product to get Siri, as some details in the iOS 5.1 beta reference the iPad in Siri Dictation.

Availability

AllThingsD has reported that the iPad announcement will come in the first week of March, but didn't specify when it would be released. For reference, the iPad 2 was announced on March 2nd of last year, and available on the 11th.

The iPad 3 will be announced on March 7th. Apple has just sent out invitations for an Apple event…
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Design

The one thing that's almost certainly not changing about the iPad is its overall look. Apple's had wild success with the size and shape, and there's no reason to rock the boat now. The WSJ has said that the company is testing out an 8-inch counterpart, but it almost certainly won't become an actual product. The only changes that could happen would be a very slightly thicker build if it needs to compensate for a retina display and/or a larger battery.

Apple just flashed their new iPad 3 on their Wednesday 7 event invite. You can clearly see the new…
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Update 2:MIC Gadget collected the scattered bits of "iPad 3" components that have been leaking here and there, and assembled what it claims is a to-scale shell of the next iPad. The takeaways? If the model is accurate, the iPad 2's Smart Cover will still work with the iPad 3, and the iPad 3 is evvvvver so slightly thicker than last year's model.

Name

Some unsubstantiated rumors had been floating around that the next iPad 3 might be called the iPad 2S. But there's a more interesting bit out there now that it might actually be the iPad HD, based on factory numbering from Griffin.